Have Trump and Tillerson Made the Secretary of State Irrelevant?

Rex Tillerson attends a meeting with Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono before the UN Security Council Ministerial Briefing on Non-Proliferation and the DPRK, at the United Nations in New York.By EDUARDO MUNOZ ALVAREZ/AFP/Getty Images.

Rex Tillerson has put in more face time with State Department staff in recent days than he has for perhaps his entire tenure. For much of the past year, the embattled secretary of state sequestered himself from the rank and file, micromanaging huge swaths of U.S. foreign policy through an impenetrable group of top advisers and making few public appearances. Now, amid rumors of his impending departure, he is trying something new. An affable, self-deprecating Tillerson made the rounds in the Harry S. Truman cafeteria on Monday, shaking hands and sharing lunch with bureaucrats. The next day, he put on a town-hall style event to preview the much-derided redesign effort on which he has pinned his legacy, and offered a candid assessment of his leadership at the State Department. Diplomats I spoke to said it was “too little, too late.”

The last-minute charm offensive may have more to do with saving Tillerson’s reputation than saving his job, which insiders say will be ending soon. That may be a quixotic campaign, given the unprecedented talent exodus that has taken place under his watch. But it is also true that Tillerson was a lame duck from the start.

Tillerson hasn’t made things easier on himself. While speaking to the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank, on Tuesday, Tillerson declared that the United States was “ready to talk any time North Korea would like to talk.” He continued, “Let’s just meet and let’s—we can talk about the weather if you want.” The remarks were immediately interpreted as a departure from the administration’s existing policy on North Korea, which the White House then scrambled to walk back. “The president’s views on North Korea have not changed. North Korea is acting in an unsafe way not only toward Japan, China, and South Korea but the entire world,” Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert told reporters that Tillerson and the White House were on the “same page” and insisted that the secretary had not unveiled a new diplomatic approach.

On Friday, Tillerson was forced to reverse himself. But the episode also underscored the extent to which the traditional role of the secretary of state has been neutered by Donald Trump, who has made himself the first and last word on all matters of foreign policy, and who routinely contradicts any spokespeople who try to anticipate his responses. It’s a recurring problem in the West Wing, though one that Tillerson has been uniquely bad at addressing. One exasperated official told The Washington Post that Tillerson’s most recent about-face showed he “had not learned his lesson from the last time,” referring to Trump’s public rebuke earlier this year when he said the secretary was “wasting his time” trying to find a diplomatic solution to the North Korean nuclear threat.

Tuesday’s clash is only the latest example of the daylight that has grown between Trump and Tillerson as the latter has staked out a series of positions at odds with his boss. The secretary of state displayed a similar independent streak when it came to the simmering dispute between U.S. Gulf allies; the financial sanctions leveled against the Venezuelan government to punish President Nicolás Maduro; the recertification of the Iran nuclear accord; and the Paris climate agreement. The relationship took a darker, perhaps fatal turn when reports emerged that Tillerson had called the president a “moron”—a remark that the secretary, notably, never explicitly denied.

The rift between the two has hamstrung U.S. foreign policy. As the White House official told the Post, Tillerson is increasingly seen as “irrelevant,” both among Trump’s Cabinet and with foreign leaders. “I think our allies know at this point he’s not really speaking for the administration,” the official added. America’s enemies, like North Korea, presumably know not to put much stock in Tillerson’s word, either. It’s no wonder he has downsized his role to that of an office manager, narrowing the scope of his responsibilities to bureaucratic matters more within his control.

It’s not impossible to represent the president on the international stage while maintaining some sense of independence. At the United Nations, Ambassador Nikki Haley has managed to walk a fine line between supporting Trump’s “America First” agenda without alienating U.S. allies and shrinking American influence on the Security Council—a balance that has mostly allowed her stay on the president’s good side. But Tillerson’s struggles to align himself with the White House are still a bad omen for any successor. Mike Pompeo, the C.I.A. director who is widely expected to take over Tillerson’s post, has a much closer relationship with Trump, as well as Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Chief of Staff John Kelly. But ultimately, any secretary of state will be trapped in the shadow of the president. Trump himself said that when it comes to U.S. foreign policy, “I'm the only one that matters.”